Available now! My essay, "The Scars We Carry," appears in the LaChance Publishing anthology, Women Reinvented: True Stories of Empowerment and Change. For more information about the book and its publisher, please visit www.lachancepublishing.com .


Examples of my published work--3 personal essays: 


"Bloodletting" --Nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize
Blood Orange Review, Spring 2010, Volume 5.1
Read the full essay here: http://bloodorangereview.com/v5-1/trahan_bloodletting.htm


"Lost, 1974"
Connotation Press, December 2010, Issue 4, Volume 2
Read the full essay here: http://www.connotationpress.com/creative-nonfiction/631-marcia-trahan-creative-nonfiction


"The Dark Room"
Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Fall 2002, Volume 4, Number 2

In 1980, when I was nine years old, my mother had a hysterectomy. I seem to have been anesthetized during the week of her hospitalization: I don't remember missing her, I don't remember feeling that she had been taken from me. Her homecoming from the hospital must have sparked a flurry of activity—my sister Anne tucking pillows behind Mom's back and running to fetch the TV remote, my father heading downstairs to smoke in the basement so that Mom wouldn't split her belly open, coughing—but I can't recall the day she came home. I remember the days afterward, when Anne and my brother, Danny, went to school, my father to work, leaving me alone with Mom.

I remember how the whole house ached, with Mom's pain at its center. She lay on the couch, a thin yellow blanket covering her legs and her bandaged belly. The air seemed to throb with hurt, the way it did when Mom got angry. She wasn't shouting at anybody now; she lay there, immobilized by something that was stronger and angrier than she was.

It was my job to keep her company while she convalesced. I hovered at the edge of the living room at first, unnerved by the thought of getting near her. My assignment had come about by process of elimination: my two oldest sisters, Carmen and Denise, were living what I imagined to be thrilling collegiate lives in New York State, too engrossed in fall-semester midterms to come home to Vermont; Danny and Anne were similarly busy with high school, tackling trigonometry and oil painting and World Lit. My father couldn't afford to lose any sales commissions from the car dealership, and even if he could have taken time off, my mother didn't consider men to be capable of caregiving; she would have found fault with his every clumsy gesture. We lived at the end of a dirt road, our patch of land bordered by cow pastures on three sides; beyond the pastures lay a dark, dense wood which held all my fears of monsters and bogeymen in it s tangle of branches. Two other houses were visible through the big bay wind ow that faced the road: little ranch homes like ours, each sealed tight with its own troubles; we hardly knew those families. The mothers had day jobs, as did my mother's sisters, who lived in the next town, ten miles north. It often seemed to Mom that she was the last housewife left on the planet.

As for me, I was gliding through the fourth grade, a so-called "gifted child." If I missed a few days, even a whole week, my parents must have figured I could easily slip back to writing reports on Michelangelo, maybe work a little harder to catch up on long division (my "gift" did not extend to mathematics). Although I was miffed that my siblings' educations were considered to be at a more crucial stage than mine, I didn't mind staying home. The speech therapist at my school had determined that I spoke with a lisp—a deficiency so slight that neither my family nor my merciless classmates had ever picked up on it—and she'd set me up for twice-weekly torment with a student therapist, Darlene. Darlene seemed to dislike children as deeply as she loved the sound of her own smooth "s"; her cold eyes narrowed as my lisp and my shyness grew worse under her supervision. Being left alone all day with Mom and her pain was vastly preferable to being cooped up for an hour with Darlene.

"Marcia?"

Mom's voice was hoarse, as if her throat had been scraped raw. I ventured closer to the couch.

"Come sit." She patted the edge of the cushions. "Just don't lean on me."

I struggle now to recall what her face looked like as she invited me to sit. Does a child ever really see her parent? To me, my mother was more a pervasive force than a person: all industry and anger. She cooked, she cleaned— and she yelled. She yelled at my father for spending the mortgage payment on a garden tractor; she yelled at the dog for sneaking up onto the couch; she yelled at us children for tracking mud across her freshly mopped linoleum. I'd be playing in my room, and suddenly her muscular, almost masculine shout would bruise the quiet: “Je-sus Christ." “What in the HELL?" “Bullshit!” The yelling scared me, although I couldn't have said what it was that I was scared of. As the youngest child, I occupied a special place, protected from Mom's anger. She never hit me; my parents never hit each other. Still, my mother's tirades were a kind of onslaught, a rain of verbal blows that seemed to demand an equally forceful response. Most of those blows landed on Dad.

When my father came home from the garage, he'd settle into "his" chair like Archie Bunker, cigarette smoke wafting around his head as if to ward us off like mosquitoes. It worked with us: we scattered the moment he picked up the remote control. He couldn't ward off Mom. Edith-like in the first guilty moments of seeing Dad exhausted after working all day, Mom would bring him a can of beer. Then she'd sit across from him on the couch to chat, and something he'd say would inevitably set her off. Usually it was about money: he'd bounced a check, lost several rounds of poker at deer camp. Or maybe he'd invited a whole bunch of relatives over for supper the next night without asking Mom if she felt like cooking for six extra people. Always, from Mom's point of view, there was some kind of betrayal that she found intolerable. "What! . . . No goddamned way," was a generally useful response to whatever my father wanted to do, or wanted her to do. Quivering behind my closed bedroom door, I could hear my father's voice only as a low rumble; he rarely yelled back. It never occurred to me to wonder why he didn't yell back; I only wondered how his eardrums didn't burst. Later, I would come to recognize his lack of response not as restraint, but apathy: he simply wanted to be left alone with his beer and the evening news. The apathy was what stirred my mother to ever-greater levels of fury, her voice growing louder and louder, until she either spent her store of rage or stormed into the kitchen to slam pots and pans around in preparation for supper (no matter how angry she got, no matter how much we dreaded eating in the midst of her sullen silence, she had supper on the table by six).

Now Mom lay still, stifled, pinned to one spot by pain. I must have looked at her, sitting as close as I was; but I have no clear image of her face. I do remember her asking, in a voice tinged with apology, "Can you get Mom some ginger ale?" as if I were four years old. Can you handle that big glass bottle with your own little hands? Can you pour without spilling? Although I was just a few months away from turning ten, I was ignorant of the most basic household tasks. My mother demanded full domestic participation from my older sisters, but all she asked of me was that I toss my dirty underwear into the clothes hamper each night and wipe down the kitchen appliances with Windex once a week. I was my mother's baby, and she couldn't seem to help spoiling me: singing me silly little songs, buying me candy and cheap toys every time we stopped at the grocery store, calling me Sweet Stuff and Baby Doll and any other gooey endearment she could think of. She lavished all of her tenderness on the last child she was ever going to have, as if she were trying to keep me a child as long as she could. She'd had my sisters and brother "like stairs": four babies in as many years, no time or inclination left for coddling; my siblings grew up as self-reliant as I was inept. If my sisters had been at home, Mom would have asked one of them to fetch her ginger ale. If she were her usual, unstoppable self she would have been in the kitchen, firing up a can of Campbell's soup for my lunch. She could not simply say, "Would you get me some ginger ale?" She couldn't admit that she was weak enough to need my help.

I was thrilled that she thought me even remotely capable of waiting on her. The aura of my mother's pain receded as I eased the bottle of Schwepp's from its place on the refrigerator shelf, next to the 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Tipping the bottle with both hands, I watched the ginger ale trickle into a juice glass, as vigilant as if I were handling radioactive waste. See? I could pour without spilling. I was of use. Triumphant, I returned to the living room to find her whimpering as she tried to sit up.

"Put a magazine under that glass," she grunted. "I don't want a ring on my coffee table. Good. Now, can you just grab those painkillers? Right there." She pointed at a prescription bottle on the end table. I stared at it; I wasn't supposed to touch prescription bottles. Ever. "Right there," she repeated. I handed Mom the bottle, watched as she tapped a couple of pills onto her palm. Painkillers. I liked the fierce sound of that. Those little tablets like pieces of chalk left from the chalkboard but perfectly round and full of danger: they would kill her pain. She tossed them back in her throat and chased them with a sip of ginger ale. "You're my good girl, taking care of Mom. You're my little nurse."

Her long, white fingers grasped mine, the bones closing in tight. My hand felt pinched, but I didn't move. As the painkillers took effect, Mom's fingers relaxed. It was the first time I saw a prescription drug work its clean, quick, odorless magic. This was not like drinking: Dad puking just-eaten oysters in the hallway inches from the tiled bathroom floor, the sound of round splatters dulled by the carpet; Mom slamming a potful of mashed potatoes on the burner and knocking over her glass of beer in the process; Mom, her speech just slightly slurred as though she were a talking doll running on dying batteries, half-dragging Dad who's completely polluted up the basement stairs, clutching him by elbow and armpit, bearing most of his weight for a couple of steps, then, "Goddamnit, you're going to make me fall," shoving him against the wall so that he has to grab the banister. I hated the sight and smell of alcohol. A white-capped glass of beer looked like the foamy piss Dad left in the toilet after he stumbled off to bed. Vodka, which Dad drank and Mom eschewed (she didn't care for "hard" liquor) was worse in its way: it didn't stink when it sat clear and crisp as spring water in a glass, but on the breath it was combustible. Pills, however, were odorless. They did not leave empty cans or bad breath in their wake. Tiny, hard, contained, they slipped down the throat and softened the body; they made everything relaxed and easy. I didn't want Mom to drink, but I loved bringing her the pills. Emboldened by that first assist, I began to offer them before she could ask.

***
I was sure I'd never seen Mom weakened, wounded like this, until I remembered what I didn't want to remember.

An image of my mother, glimpsed so briefly it had been easy to forget: One afternoon, a couple of years earlier, I found Mom sitting in the finished basement room, snuffling against her closed fist. Astonishment froze me for a long moment—Mom, crying?—until she looked up. "Go and have Carmen make your lunch."

The basement room, its tiny windows eye-level with the lawn, was dark in the middle of the day. We called it the "family room." Dad had nailed real barnboard onto the walls; Mom had knelt for hours stroking deep brown paint onto the cement floor. But nothing could disguise the fact that this was the basement, the bottom, the damp space that yawned beneath us. The couch that huddled in front of the TV smelled dank. Dad's quilt-patterned recliner stank of old cigarette smoke and little spills of vodka. I touched Mom's sleeve. "Go upstairs, now," she insisted. There were no backs on the stairs, no railing; at least Mom had tacked ribbed plastic protectors onto each step. Climbing those stairs always scared me; I imagined monsters grabbing my feet, I saw myself falling backward into empty space. Then I emerged into another world. In the light-filled kitchen my oldest sister, Carmen, straight dark hair dipping down the middle of her back, asked if I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich. Calm and capable, she slathered two pieces of white bread with margarine, put slices of Velveeta in between, and pressed the sandwich flat against the spitting pan with a spatula. She was 17; I was 7. She must have known what the trouble was, down to the last detail, the last penny, the last drink. I never knew details; I only had my dim, damp sense of things. Many years later, with Carmen's help, I would come to believe that I understood the varied sources of my mother's despair—loneliness, exhaustion, financial worries, all compounded by alcohol (I say this now, knowing I can never really know)—but at 17, Carmen didn't offer insight into that particular day's crisis, and at 7, I didn't ask.

***
Except for that single, swiftly forgotten incident, before the hysterectomy it had never occurred to me that Mom might need relief from pain. The mother I knew was too busy to hurt, too strong and able to require anybody's help; her anger seemed to me an extension of her strength. She built pies from scratch: peeling and chopping a bagful of apples, flattening the crust into tender, silky sheets, adding dashes of cinnamon and nutmeg with quick jerks of her hand. She dragged wet laundry out to the clothesline so that they could absorb the smell of sun. Trembling on a ladder high above the stairwell, she pasted pale wallpaper over the turquoise paint favored by the house's previous owner, preferring to risk her neck rather than endure that shrill color.

All of this dicing and hauling and bravery on ladders tricked me into believing that Mom enjoyed homemaking, that she was born to it. Her skill and persistence fueled my Little House on the Prairie fantasies: I longed to be Laura, so I convinced myself that Mom was Ma, only with modern appliances. We were a warm, loving, hearty brood just like the Ingalls. Weren't we? I could pretend that the Holsteins that sometimes broke through fences and trampled our vegetable garden belonged to us and not to the farmer down the road. I could believe that the roasted chicken being sawed apart at our supper table had been killed by my father that very afternoon on a backyard stump. I could watch the skies for blizzards and hail­storms and grasshopper plagues, secure in the knowledge that even if the crops failed, within the four walls of our house our family was inviolable.

Mom was neither the stern, unflinching Ma of the Little House books nor the perpetually moist-eyed, angelic Ma of the TV series. Family was the center of her life, but she didn't surrender herself to us wholeheartedly. Whereas either Ma would have kept any complaints to herself, my mother never sugar-coated her disdain for the daily tedium of cooking, laundry, dusting—yet her pleasure in the finished product, in the hot meal fed to hungry children, the stack of precisely folded shirts laid in a dresser drawer, the kitchen restored to order after dinner with the counters slick-wet and shining, was evident in her expression: a look of shy triumph, like a schoolgirl too modest to gloat about winning the spelling bee. The only job she loved unequivocally was decorating: she needed to continually reinvent the spaces we lived in with paint and paper and carpet, needed the hard work of spreading herself across a big canvas; it was her one indulgence. Not one of my mother's pregnancies had been planned, each had presented itself as a new burden—yet it was the pregnancies, the difficult labors, the burden of raising too many children that gave shape to her life. She drew deep satisfaction from knowing that we depended on her for everything, that we had been born because of her and survived because of her—"I made every one of you," she would gloat years later, the lipsticked matriarch with all five of her grown children gathered around a restaurant table on a rare night out—and she wondered what else she might have accomplished in her life if she hadn't lost herself in caring for us. I have wondered about that, too; I always will.

***
Mom propped herself up at a gentle incline to watch Wheel of Fortune. I fished recent copies of the Ladies Home Journal out of the magazine rack, folded the "Living" section of the newspaper into quarters so that Mom could work the crossword puzzle. A kind of peace settled over us. I closed the drapes against the glittering autumn sunshine while Mom napped. The house was quiet once I turned off the TV; our phone never rang much. I rounded up dirty juice glasses, polished the living-room furniture with lemon-scented Pledge, scooped Ken-L-Ration into the dog's dish. I had never thought much about somebody not being able to move around; now I felt grateful for my good strong legs, my hands that could do so much, pick up and put away and straighten.

Mom got up only to use the bathroom, crying out softly as she lifted herself. I brought her light foods: vanilla pudding, white toast thinly spread with margarine. She was losing weight. Drinking beer had given her a belly over the past few years, straining the seams of her polyester stretch pants. Later I would discover that her weight embarrassed my teenaged sisters. It didn't embarrass me, at nine. That soft body, improbably held up by long, milky legs as slender as a fashion model's, was the only version of mother I had ever known until now. This Mom who lay on the couch resembled the mother in the photographs taken before I was born. In those pictures a skinny young woman, determinedly smiling a bright-red-lipsticked smile, and a skinny, solemn-faced young man sit on opposite ends of a sofa, with a row of plump babies between them. Every year, for four years, another baby. With each one the distance between the man and the woman grows wider. Those skinny people were my brother and sisters' parents. Now Mom looked like that woman in the pictures, paste-white and delicate, except there was no smile, no red lips.

Once, when she was about to change the dressing on her incision, she asked, "Do you want to see it? If not, you'd better look away." I couldn't look away. She raised the hem of her nightgown, pushed the waistband of her white nylon panties down past her belly, then peeled off strips of surgical tape. Lifting the large sheet of gauze, she bared it to me: a long, red ribbon of flesh, the edges sewn together with wiry black thread like the seams of a dress turned inside out. The sight sent a shiver down the back of my neck. "This is how you were born: they cut me open and took you out. That's a Caesarean. Danny and Anne were born the same way. Think of that—the doctors have cut my belly open four times." I had seen scalpels on TV, and I imagined a surgeon slicing her belly in half like a round pot roast.

Before I could get used to seeing where I'd come from, she taped on a fresh piece of gauze, and I knew that the subject of babies was closed; I always knew better than to ask about that. My parents freely made crude sexual jokes in my hearing, correctly assuming that I wouldn't know what they were talking about. I absorbed the message long before I understood the words: something ridiculous lurked between the legs of men, something equally absurd hid between the legs of women, and the clumsy something they did together made babies. All of it was so unspeakably embarrassing that plain language delivered without winks and sniggers couldn't describe it.

My mother's brash sexual slang failed to disguise the shame she felt toward her own body. I never saw her wearing anything less than her chaste white-nylon underwear; I'd never gotten a good look at her bare belly until now. This was what being a woman was: strange secrets and terrible injuries, scars on top of scars. The word for my mother's operation was hysterectomy—a name for something vital ripped from its roots. I knew that it meant my mother couldn't have any more babies, but I didn't know what it was that was gone, I didn't understand what it was that we both had lost.

Covering herself again with her nightgown, my mother gave me one final piece of information: "This hurts more than a Caesarean. A lot more. A baby's meant to come out sometime, you know, but organs are supposed to stay in you forever."

I felt jealous, hearing that. Pain had driven my mother down into a dark room to cry; now it confined her to the couch, rendered her unable to sit up without wincing. I didn't want my mother to suffer, but I wanted to be the most important thing in her life. If the hysterectomy hurt her more than the Caesarean that had produced me, then it mattered more than my birth. Children dance in a strange balance between empathy and self-absorption: I felt my mother's pain in the very air we breathed, felt it quiver in me—and still it angered me that I was not the center of her universe. I saw that my mother had a life which was distinct from mine, that her body was vulnerable; she was vulnerable. That wound in her belly was my first clue that she would not endure forever, not even for me.